The ultimate reason why I need to have an Android device is Tasker, the app that’s responsible for 80% of what I do on my phone being custom creations. iOS has a lot of advantages, but the lack of Tasker is definitely something I notice when I use my iPad mini. Reddit user NickMc53 seems to be in the same boat, and that resulted in him coming up with a very neat trick that uses the jailbreak tweak Activator to mimic a very common Tasker creation: custom menus.

Activator is a jailbreak tweak that is often overlooked, because it’s a free tweak installed automatically by a lot of other tweaks (however you can grab it from Cydia if you don’t already have it installed). It’s designed to allow you to tie various button presses and gestures to things like locking the screen or opening an app, and is most commonly used to trigger other jailbreak tweaks. However, it has a feature that I for one wasn’t aware of until I saw the Reddit post: the ability to create custom menus. The option is available right from the main menu of Activator, and it’s fairly straight forward and self explanatory to create these menus- you just select what you want.

These menus essentially allow you to add any of Activator’s actions to a menu that you can make appear using any of Activator’s triggers. The example used in the original post is to tie the event of the headphones being plugged in to opening a menu with quick links to media apps. You could however also do other things, like create a more advanced shutdown menu (with reboot and respring), add gestures to open up quick access menus to different types of apps, make settings menus, and so on.

It’s not exactly as powerful as Tasker’s scene creation system, but at least it’s something. I know a lot of Tasker users love having a media menu appear when plugging in headphones, and that alone is a neat feature to have on iOS. Since Activator is free, it doesn’t even cost you anything to play around with this, and you might already have Activator installed if your device is jailbroken.

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About the Author

Andreas Ødegård was an associate editor at Pocketables. He’s more interested in aftermarket (and user created) software and hardware than chasing the latest gadgets and tends to stick with his choice of device for a long time as a result of that. Currently that includes an iPad mini and a Samsung Galaxy S II.